Writing as Echo-Making in and after the Anthropocene

Abstract

ABSTRACTRecent criticism has shown how Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (2006) indicts both traditional Cartesian consciousness and neuroscience, but there is no consensus as to the reasons for these critiques. Some see an endorsement of “radical subjectivism,” while others see a humanist satire of the excesses of Dr. Gerald Weber, the novel’s spokesperson for neuroscience. Building on the work of Jacques Derrida and Emilo Benveniste, this essay proposes that not only mind and matter but also hermeneutics are faulted—all from the perspective of language conceived as “echo making,” or the iteration of arbitrary signs. This possibility is latent in the plot throughout but becomes manifest in the climactic scene when the protagonist, Mark Schluter, identifies reality with grammatical shifters—locatives and pronouns. This broader reason for the novel’s indictments implicates novel-writing and criticism, too, as vitiated strivings after signification. Powers’s title is a translation of an indigenous North American tribe’s word for “sandhill crane,” whose migratory route includes Kearney, Nebraska, the setting. Through occasional intercalary chapters that speculate on the cranes’ existence prior to and after the anthropocene, the novel depicts echo-making as independent of the human.